DF vets prove the inscrutable game can be something other than a torture device.

Not long ago, I tried to play an insanely difficult-to-understand game called Dwarf Fortress. It was hard. It was nigh-impenetrable in terms of its mechanics and interface. I spent a good long time helplessly watching the best minds of my dwarf clan destroyed by madness, thirst, and mysterious tantrums. I got exactly nowhere without the most explicit and procedural instructions, and even then progress was slow, painstaking, and shadowed by failure (or as DF fans refer to it, “fun”) at every step.

But there are more than a few endlessly patient souls who have pushed through those early trials (some for hundreds of hours). These survivors exhibit such agency with the game that they not only live, but thrive next to threats like volcanoes and necromancy towers. Following the Ars article, a number of DF forumgoers took it upon themselves to flip our 10-hour challenge on its head: what could a handful of experienced players accomplish in 10 hours? Just how far could they get?

In a contest to develop the most interesting scenarios, the players voted amongst themselves and came up with both a winner and runner-up fort for their usage of time and diaries they kept during their 10 hours of play (both paused and unpaused time counted towards the total). Even though all players were longtime veterans, one was forced to resign from the contest due to a “level 10 aquifer.”

Enlarge/ A massive underground room where it appears Thatdude mined for stone.

The winning fort, built by user Thatdude, set out not to make a fort, but to build an entire above-ground town. The user gave each dwarf its own personal house—not a trivial task, given that standard procedure is to dig a hole in the ground and throw the dwarves in, as opposed to collecting and processing enough materials to create dozens of structures.

Integral to Thatdude’s success was trading (read: stealing) goods from visiting humans and elves. Waves of migrants (homeless dwarves who show up and want to live with you) had generally pointless jobs and children (really just mouths to feed until they grow up). This did not help the situation.

Around the five-hour mark, a hill titan (a “colossal grouse that shoots webs”) entered the map and proceeded to rend the landscape and murder innocent dwarves. A short time later, a “tantrum spiral” begins, which Eric Nelson, another veteran player, describes as a dangerous scenario that “can kill even the biggest or best defended forts.” Why? The destruction comes from within.

According to the DF wiki, a tantrum spiral begins with a single unhappy dwarf who becomes possessed of a rage and starts throwing items around or starting fistfights. The dwarf will get punished, but if his punishment is too severe, more dwarves have tantrums as a result. This creates a chain reaction of “fun.” Thatdude started the spiral with 84 dwarves. Two hours later, the last berserking dwarf is put down, and the fort is down to a population of 21.

Enlarge/ Where Thatdude buried all of the spoils of his dwarves' tantrum spiral, i.e., the results of "fun."

By the time Thatdude hits 10 hours, he has a room for every living dwarf, and a grave and marker for all except the last one to die. The end population is 87, with 67 dead and 4 years of in-game time elapsed.

The runner-up fort, built by forum user Mishrak, started out as an attempt to roleplay a tie-in to Ars’ attempt to play the game. Sadly, “fun” quickly got involved and Mishrak ran out of time. He did, however, manage to build a tribute room dedicated to Ars out of gold and magma, which eventually became residence to a dead necromancer and bodies of the fallen.

Mishrak embarked near a necromancy tower and a volcano, which are apparently just things that crop up for funsies in a game like DF. Both are bad scenarios waiting to happen: necromancy towers, as in fiction, produce “zombie sieges, necromancer migrants, and vampires.” The volcano, as in real life, periodically results in large-scale destruction and hot, fiery death.

Enlarge/ Where Mishrak embarked, bordered on most sides by threats of doom.

Enlarge/ Mishrak's gold-and-magma-encrusted room constructed as a tribute to Ars, eventually filled with dead bodies. The message is not lost on us.

Mishrak set about finding water (there was none above ground, so he had to dig 121 levels down to find a subterranean water source) and creating booze, an element that is “one of the most critical factors in the success or failure of a fort,” he said. “Dwarves that have no alcohol won’t be able to work efficiently and will work twice as slow… it’s on par with necessity of fresh food and water in terms of fort survival.” An enviable game mechanic.

The golden Ars room Mishrak built was not just a room, but a 20-level-deep pit over which Mishrak put a drawbridge to his colony. Any time an entity tried to cross the bridge, Mishrak could pull a lever and drop them, sometimes to their death, into the Ars room. Some beings survived the fall, including the necromancer, who can reanimate corpses into zombies. “Were I to continue with the fort,” Mishrak said, “it would have been even more glorious a room—filled with zombie goblins and other things.”

Enlarge/ The surface level of Mishrak's fort, with the drop bridge in the upper center region.

The semi-deadly trap seemed to avoid the problem of tantrum spirals, as the enemies weren’t being willfully murdered by anyone other than gravity. Unburied or unmemorialized dwarves lying around can also cause tantrum spirals, but since the corpses were sealed off in a room, they couldn’t cause tantrum spirals either. “I’ve a feeling I’m not too far from a siege,” Mishrak wrote.

Early on in the essay describing his fort, Mishrak wrote that he “tried to open HFS” but encountered problems digging under the magma sea. I asked what HFS was. “HFS is a code name for a spoiler,” Mishrak told me.

“I can spoil it for you if you want,” he said. “Or you can get good enough at the game to where you hunt for adamantine or dig REALLY deep and find out for yourself.” New players are said to be just getting the hang of the game after hundreds of hours and dozens of failed forts. And my minimal progress is widely known after less than half a day with the game. This is an anxiety-inducing, daunting proposition.

Promoted Comments

The game really isn't all that hard to get into, if you accept that the UI sucks and is horribly unintuitive and you won't get far just by experimenting. You'll have to look up information on the wiki or in tutorials, and refusing to do that is just an exercise in frustration.

In 10 hours you can easily go from being a complete beginner to having a fairly successful fortress.

It's only impossible to get into if you refuse to look up information elsewhere. It's also missing the point of the game, because the fun *really* isn't in trying to figure out which key to press to order an elephant killed or a tunnel dug out.

Download Dwarf Therapist, watch a few of captnduck's tutorials on Youtube, and you're ready to make fortresses within an hour or two.

I have no experience with this game whatsoever beyond reading the last article on Ars that described it as a torture-like experience. I'm hoping against all hope that what you say is true- that it can be mastered quickly- because with a UI like the one shown in those screenshots, I have no doubt this is a game capable of making people lose their sanity. I'd prefer to keep mine intact if I get a chance to try the game out.

I think it's true. The trick is just to accept any help you can get. Don't try to be tough or think "I can figure this out on my own." You can't. But if you let others teach you (wiki or youtube), then it's not too bad.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston